Media Art Xploration Present READ SUBTITLES ALOUD A Participatory Melodrama About The Digital Theater Of Life In A Pandemic,

MAX, a nonprofit organization working with artists and scientists to create live arts exploiting the scientific and technological innovations of our time, presents the English-language premiere of Onur Karaoglu and Kathryn Hamilton's Read Subtitles Aloud, an episodic hybrid video/performance work whose only live component is the viewer.

Reading subtitles on the screen, the viewer enters as character X into a crumbling theater collective, becoming the main character in a story-of camaraderie, sex, betrayal, and the digital theater of life in a pandemic-that's unfolding across 13 episodes.

Pairing soap opera-ish relational roller coasters with the flattened, dulled realism of Zoom sociality, Read Subtitles Aloud speaks with humor and immediacy to a moment when our physical selves have leapt further into virtual modes of connection than ever before, when it's hard to distinguish connection from isolation. Read Subtitles Aloud, based on Altyazıları Yüksek Sesle Oku, created by Onur Karaoglu, written and directed by Karaoglu and Hamilton, and presented in association with PlayCo, will be presented in daily episodes, available here, from November 12-23.

Let's say you're X. You have all of X's talent and egotism, defensiveness and vulnerability. At least, the subtitles on your screen dictate that you do. You used to be the resident writer for a theater company. You moved to Hollywood, created a problematic TV series, and cultivated your Instagram activism. Sorry, you don't like being called an Instagram activist. The pandemic hit. Your collaborators Onur, Kathryn, Meera, and Fatih want you back-maybe grudgingly. They can't realize their project, giving voice to the behavioral peculiarities of this moment-where more than ever before, our digitized selves lead scintillating social lives and our physical selves sit and stare, red-eyed and envious-without your evocative words, your acute observations. And they're going to use one of your ideas, whether you participate or not. Your collaborators have a hard time resisting your allure, even over Zoom. They seem to want to do a lot of screen-kissing. It's unclear whether they want to work with you, have sex with you, or betray you. Can they be trusted? Can you? Perhaps this is fertile ground for a quarantine project.

Despite the many intimate conversations the audience member has with characters portrayed by its small ensemble of performers (including Onur Karaoglu, Kathryn Hamilton, Meera Kumbhani, and Fatih Gençkal, and special guest star Paul Lazar), the actors are all pre-recorded, and the audience member isn't being recorded at all: they are the only witness to their existence as X. They enact a character rife with agency-but are dictated every step of the way; speaking to simulacra, they are merely reading subtitles aloud, participating with themselves. As such, Read Subtitles Aloud offers a new form of "participatory theater"-one that evokes the queasy simultaneity of control and submission, loneliness and communion, that our screen-captured selves experience every day.

This work features art direction by two-time Tony-winning scenic designer Christine Jones, costume and set curation by Zoë Hurwitz, lighting design by Bill Berner, and dramaturgy by Emily Reilly.

Says Karaoglu, "The idea started from reading subtitles aloud, at home alone watching a film, as if you're the character, and acting with the actors onscreen. I similarly hate theater audiences to be sitting somewhere in the dark and not interacting with the work; so from this instinct of subtitle reading came a way to empower the viewer. And the viewer becomes the strongest element in the story, actually taking over everything by the end of the 13 episodes."

Adds Hamilton, "The piece is very playful with this idea of reading and the meta-story of what the subtitles are doing, and the idea that the audience actually doesn't have much agency. It asks questions about what it means to be stuck on this fated loop, and digital intimacy, digital shame, digital betrayal, and what happens to your humanity when you don't have to be face-to-face with someone. What kind of strange paranoias have been stirred up in all of us in this new way of interacting? How have we become untethered from the ways we would previously behave?"

Read Subtitles Aloud is part of MAX's MAXvirtual initiative, launched this spring to present online works. MAXvirtual reflects the mission of the young organization, whose first year of programming, in 2019, brought together over 100 artists and scientists in venues including Carnegie Hall, The Exploratorium, and the Norton Museum of Art to collapse the bifurcated worlds of art and technology. MAX activates science's ability to inform and expand art, and emphasizes art's ability to humanize and unpack the rapid advancements altering the fundamentals of everyday existence.

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